From Work to Text?

Geoffrey Thurley asserts that "Barthes's essay
["From Work to Text"] is no
more than an expression of a determination not to acknowledge the old
`bourgeois' literature, and we should waste our time chasing shadows if we
tried to assign his phrases any concrete meaning" (Thurley 228). Though
this comment was meant as a criticism of Barthes's work, the second part
of the sentence ironically approximates Barthes' own formulation of his
essay. His essay offers "not argumentations but enunciations, `touches',
approaches that consent to remain metaphorical" (Barthes 192). Meaning,
in Barthes' essay, is established by difference - his entire text consists
of a play of signifiers which have meaning, not in themselves, but in
relation to other signifiers. The concept of "text" is defined only as it
is juxtapositioned with the concept of "work." To attempt to assign a
`concrete meaning' to "From Work to Text," to attempt to find the kernel
of meaning behind this essay would be unBarthean in both spirit and
approach. That does not mean that this text is fundamentally
incomprehensible. It does mean that, while one might attempt to grasp the
sense of what a "work" might be or what a "text" might be, it would be
going against the grain of Barthes's essay to attempt to discover the
essence of the text and the essence of the work. Accordingly, in this
essay, I will attempt to delineate rather than to define the signifying
fields of "work" and "text" as developed in Barthes' "From Work to Text."

Before I begin to describe what a "work" and what a "text"
might be, however, it is important to determine whether these terms
reflect an approach to literature or whether they reflect some qualitative
aspect of literature itself. In other words, can any piece of writing be
viewed as either a work or a text, or are there some texts that are
characteristically texts and others that are characteristically works?

On one hand, Barthes implies that there is a concrete quality
to some writing which identifies it as "text" and not as "work." When
discussing the issue of whether texts can be seen as a product of
modernity, he comments: "There may be `text' in a very ancient work, while
many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts" (Barthes
193). This text, however, has no objective reality, but exists only as
praxis: "The Text is experienced only in an activity of
production" (Barthes 193). The text, then, is not the physical entity
that sits on a bookshelf, but something that comes into existence only as
it is done.

According to Barthes, only certain types of works can be
produced as texts. Some works tend to represent an attempt to
circumscribe meaning; others require the reader to co-author the text. "I
can delight in reading . . . Proust, Flaubert, Balzac . . . But this
pleasure . . . remains in part . . . a pleasure of consumption; for . . .
I know that I cannot rewrite them" (Barthes 197). The Text,
insofar as it invites the reader to rewrite it, "is bound to
jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation" (Barthes
197).

On the other hand, he claims that anything could be read as a
text. Despite his later claim that Proust's work is not a text, he writes
that Proust's life can be read as text. "It is the work of Proust, of
Genet which allows their lives to be read as text" (Barthes 195), he
writes. He seems to indicate that the applicability of the terms "work"
and "text" is determined, not by some inherent quality within a piece of
writing, but by ways of seeing literature in general. For instance, he
proposes that a work is read under the auspices of the "myth of filiation"
(Barthes 195) while a text is read as a part of the vast network of
intertextuality. "The work is caught up in a process of filiation . . .
As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father" (Barthes
195). Whether one chooses to subscribe to the `myth of filiation' or not
seems to be largely a function of one's reading methodology and not of
one's discernment of qualities inherent in the specific work/text.

Thurley is inclined to dismiss this aspect of his theory as
"profound uncertainty" (Thurley, 228). I do think, however, that
Barthes's statements work together to form, a tenable, if problematic
position. His view of the text does set up a methodology of reading. At
the same time, Barthes is recognizing that some texts are more amenable to
this methodology than others. All pieces of writing are "texts" - some,
however, are more text-like than others because they intentionally resist
closure. The text written as a text consciously submits to the symbolic
nature of language. "Thus it is restored to language" (Barthes 194),
Barthes writes.

In this essay, I will be primarily concerned with exploring
how Barthes delineates a methodology of reading. This is more
revolutionary than merely claiming that some works are written with the
text in mind while others are merely written as works. For not only the
way in which we express meaning, but our conception of the very nature of
meaning itself is transformed as we follow the "epistemological slide"
(Barthes 192) that marks the shift of focus from the work to the text.

The conception of the text reflects an alteration of what is
considered to constitute meaning. Barthes explains that his notion of the
Text is inextricable from a certain way of viewing language. Language, he
writes, "is structured but off-centred, without closure" (Barthes 194).
There is, then, no meaning, per se, for there is no centre, no
locus of meaning to be found. Meaning does not represent the
presence of the sign, but rather is a representation of the deferment of
meaning: "The work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal
that it should represent an institutional category of the civilisation of
the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of
the signified" (Barthes 193).

Since there is no locus of meaning to be found in the
text, the traditional boundaries placed on meaning in a work are no longer
guides to meaning. If meaning is presence, it can be presented in a
controlled way by the author and can be seen to occupy a defined space.
If meaning is a chimera; if meaning is in fact the absence, the deferment
of meaning, then it is fundamentally uncontrollable and refuses to be
confined and tied down to a specific signification. The language in a
text is not defined by the language in the work which lies between the
covers of the book. In Barthes's words, "the work can be held in the
hand, the text is held in language" (Barthes, 193).

Accordingly, critics who work within the conceptual space of
the work circumscribe this space. The meanings found within the work are
determined by the author, by the work's historical place within the world,
and by its relation to other works (Barthes, 195). The relation between
works, however, is subordinated to the authority of the work itself. For
while the sources "influence" the work, the determinations of authorial
intention dictate the way in which the sources will be shaped (Barthes
195).

According to the concept of the text, by contrast, the sources
are not the background of the work which can be separated from the work
itself, but are an inextricable part of that text. The work itself is
"the text-between of another text" (Barthes 195), Barthes writes. These
sources run through the text and yet are "anonymous, untraceable"
(Barthes, 195). Since every text only exists as a part of the vast web
vast of intertextuality that forms the Text, the author cannot control the
meanings that he/she attempts to present in the text: "It is not that the
may not `come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a
`guest' (Barthes 195).

When all of the controls which are found in the domain of the
work are removed, interpretation is impossible, for there is not one voice
which emerges, but rather, a multitude of voices. The voices that are
woven through the text as a result of its existence as a part of the
intertextual explode in a cacophony of noise. "The Text is plural,"
Barthes explains, "Which is not simply to say that it has several
meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plurality of meaning: an
irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural" (Barthes, 194).

Perhaps it would be more in accordance with Barthes's
methodology to attempt to demonstrate the difference between viewing a
piece of literature as a text and as a work. For Barthes emphasizes that
his "few propositions" outlined in his essay "do not constitute the
articulations of a Theory of the Text" (Barthes 197) for a theory, in
effect, is a metalanguage which claims to exist apart from the Text itself
which is an impossibility according to Barthes' own articulation of the
Text. "The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than
text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social
space which leaves no language safe" (Barthes 197), Barthes writes.

In this context, it would be interesting to look at Barthes's
own essay as a work and as a text. In many ways, Barthes signals his own
separation from the "Newtonian" texts that claim to be works (Barthes
192). In other ways, however, the philosophy of the work inevitably
permeates his own claims to avoid its dictates. As a work, as an entity
which is separable from the discourse surrounding it, Barthes can claim
that his essay is in conformation with the view of the text.
Paradoxically, when viewed as a text, this separation from those texts
which claim to be works is not achieved.

If I were analyzing Barthes' essay from the point of view of
the theory of the work, I would accept his authorial claims to place
"text" at the critical centre of attention and to throw the concept of
"work" onto the periphery. At the beginning and at the end of his essay,
Barthes clearly indicates his intention to separate his own critical
formulations from critical formulations of the work. Since meta-language
employs logic in order to set its own string of signifiers apart from the
text, he will avoid doing so. He sets up the "arguments" and the "logic"
which others employ in opposition to his "propositions" which are to be
"understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense" (Barthes 192).
During the course of the work, he attempts to maintain the distance
between the binary opposition of "work" and "text" by defining each term
in contrast to its Other. At the end of his essay, he again insists that
his "few propositions . . . inevitably" fail to form a meta-language which
would dictate how a text should be read (Barthes 197).

In other ways,
however, the essay belongs to the textual world consisting of texts
conceived as works. For instance, though he claims to avoid formulating a
Theory of the Text, he cannot in fact escape the need to understand
language through theorizing. Though he signals his aversion to logical
constructs by attempting to assert rather than attempting to explain what
constitutes a work and what constitutes a text, he cannot do so without
operating according to the dictates of a meta-language.

His attempt
to distance himself from the `logical' language of literary criticism is
only moderately successful. The aphoristic style which he employs to this
end has been used before. Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosiphicus, for example, is composed entirely of aphorisms.
And yet, taken together, they form the logical positivism of the early
Wittgenstein. Similarly, Barthes's assertions work together to form a
kind of logic which is more or less internally coherent. As I hope my
essay has demonstrated, Barthes does have a theory of the text which is
permeated by a certain view of what constitutes meaning and language. His
enunciations do constitute the articulations of a Theory of the
Text.

In addition, according to my reading of "From Work to Text," Barthes
compensates for the way in which he attempts to distance his own writing
from the conception of the work by connecting his writing with the world
of the work. He cannot claim outright that the logic of the text has
supplanted the logic of the work, for that would be the equivalent of
setting up a tyranny of the meta-text. Instead, he compares the shift
from work to text to the shift from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian
conception of the universe:

Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the
frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined
action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature,
the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer
(critic) (Barthes 192).

Science establishes a meta-language which is generally accorded a greater
degree of objectivity than a non-empirical discourse like literary theory.
In using a scientific metaphor, he implies not only that the work is old
fashioned, but that the logic behind the work has been superseded.

This comparison between scientific and non-scientific discourse has also
been made before. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, for instance, Kant makes such a
claim. All previous
philosophers were blinded by their adherence to the Ptolemaic system of
the universe, he claims. By contrast, he has effected the philosophical
equivalent of a Copernican revolution:

Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of
the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the
spectator, [Copernicus] tried whether he might not have better success if
he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A
similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition
of objects (Kant 22).

Kant is certainly setting up a meta-language here. In fact, his
confidence about his ability to set up this meta-language borders on
arrogance. "The danger is not that of being refuted, but of not being
understood" (Kant 36-37), he writes. When Barthes' essay is viewed in
light of Kant's use of this trope, the hint of the authority of science
which, as I have argued, adheres to the metaphor itself, is intensified.
This authoritative overtone strains against Barthes' own aversion to
setting up a meta-language.

According to Barthes' theories, whether Kant's text is seen to flow
into Barthes is not a function of whether or not Barthes' writing was
directly influenced by Kant. As Barthes writes, the influences of a text
are anonymous, untraceable:

The Text . . . [is] woven entirely with citations,
references, echoes, cultural languages . . . which cut across it through
and through in a vast stereophony. . . The citations which go to make up a
text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read (Barthes
194-5)

If I can see how Kant's writings can be seen to flow through Barthes'
work, that part of Kant's writings which seems to be echoed in Barthes'
work becomes a part of what Barthes is saying. There are no boundaries
between texts and source texts, but only a vast web of intertextuality.

Meaning in Barthes' essay, then, is irreducible. It is an
articulation of the theory of the Text; at the same time, it resists a
complete articulation of the theory of the Text. Barthes proclaims his
allegiance to the text rather than to the work and yet he can only do so
by attempting to cut himself off from the texts which surround his text.
This attempt to remove himself from the logic of the work is inevitably
unsuccessful.

Any position on how to read texts seems to be inevitably formulated in
a meta-textual way. To claim that we can work just within the realm of
the text without aspiring to reach beyond it is an illusion. At the same
time, I agree with Barthes that meta-narratives are themselves a part of
the world of intertextuality. We must work according to the
meta-narratives we have created. And yet, these meta-narratives can never
really escape from the Text itself.

Lisa Smith is a student in ENGL 4F70, 1997-98 at Brock University;
she is a year 4 Honours English and Liberal Studies combined major.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text" in Modern
Literary Theory.
ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh. New York: Arnold, 1996.